A unique look at one of the most famous Confederate generals, and at how his wife built and controlled his memory after his death. Gordon (History/Univ. of Akron) looks carefully at the early years of General Pickett, leader of the most famous failed attack in American history (his charge at Gettysburg), and goes on to look at his career on the western frontier and his decision to serve in the Confederate army. Pickett’s career was solid but not stellar, and Gordon covers it in balanced detail. The story gathers momentum with Pickett’s marriage in 1864 to his third wife, LaSalle, and his command at Gettysburg. Following the war, the financially ruined couple fled to Canada to escape prosecution for war crimes, and Pickett was forced to lobby his West Point classmate Ulysses S. Grant for a pardon. After Pickett’s death in 1875, LaSalle toured the country on the lecture circuit, portraying herself as a southern belle and her husband as the embodiment of all of the ideals southern masculinity and published Pickett and his Men. Gordon analyzes the sub-surface forces that shaped popular images of the Civil War in the years following it and looks at how LaSalle created a career for herself as a Confederate widow; she managed to make a living at it until 1931. Arguably, she shaped the manner in which Pickett’s career will forever be viewed by “creating” a cache of letters that offer a vision of the soldier that was far greater than his actual persona. Gordon’s analysis of Lasalle is cutting and offers a close-up of a major figure of the Civil War. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-8078-2450-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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